


The Spirit of the Thing

by tawg



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-24
Updated: 2011-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-20 16:39:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The transgenics try to struggle through their first winter in Terminal City, and in trying to distract one another from the cold, Christmas happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spirit of the Thing

Alec lay stretched across a couch that was too short for his body, his feet hanging off one end. His face was pressed into the worn red corduroy of the cushions, which would leave grooves down his cheek when he eventually woke. But Max knew that wouldn’t be for hours to come. Unlike herself, Alec had always embraced the indulgence of sleep. And besides, he’d had a long day.

*

Terminal City was painfully cold in December, a harsh wind whipping through the narrow streets. Very few of the transgenics had a full wardrobe of winter wear, and fights had broken out between the desert-engineered transgenics and the ‘less needy’ over the allocation of some of the thicker coats. The city of Seattle seemed to have no problem with letting its mutant problem freeze during the winter, and while many inconspicuous members of the community stole back into the city proper to steal and borrow, there just wasn’t enough of anything to go around.

“This is all we could scrape up over at Jam Pony,” Original Cindy said as she handed some boxes packed with clothes over to Max. They were standing by a currently unknown gap in the fence that both protected and restricted Terminal City. “There’s some boots in there, socks too.” OC frowned at the boxes stacked on the other side of the fence. “It’s not much,” she said flatly, and Max could feel the anger and the apology in the words.

“It’s more than we had before,” Max said, and their breath clouded in the air before Max reached out and pulled Original Cindy into a hug. “Thank you,” she said.

Original Cindy’s lips curled into a reluctant smile. “You think Original Cindy is going to let her lickety-boo shiver all through the winter? Nuh-uh.”

Max pulled away, and zipped OC’s jacket up to her chin. “You should get going.”

OC regarded Max for a long moment, “Yeah,” she said, “I should. I know you’re takin’ care of everyone and their dog in there, but you make sure you take care of yourself too.”

Max smiled. “It’ll be my special present to you.”

Cindy smiled, swung her leg over her bike, and pedalled away. Max watched until she was out of site, and watched the shadow that would follow her for the several blocks it would take her to reach the populated industrial area. A few minutes later, Alec was walking back along the road towards Terminal City, kicking idly at the puddles in the pocked road.

“She’s fine,” he said, picking up a box and holding it in front of his stomach. Max stacked another two on top of his load, effectively hiding his face.

“Kindness is a good look for you, Alec,” she teased.

Alec kicked at a puddle, sending muddy water up the leg of Max’s pants, and ran off before she could retaliate. The X5s ran through the streets of Terminal City, laughing and splashing, and keeping the cold away.

*

Mole huddled down into his coats, a dark wool trench over his usual military issue jacket. “Well,” he said grudgingly, “It’s an improvement.” His reptilian skin was more green than yellow, pale from the cold.

“It’s all we got,” Alec replied, flattening the boxes and unknotting the string that had held them closed. He then dangled the string in front of Max’s face, as if he were playing with a kitten. Max elbowed him in the stomach, and then stole his string.

“It’s our first winter here,” she said, her voice carrying over the mumbling and rustling of the mutants. “And if we can get through the first, we can get through the rest.”

“If we can get through one inspiring speech,” Alec called out, “we can tune out during the rest!” Max slapped him with the end of a scarf, and Alec pulled it out of her grip with a smirk, before wrapping it around Joshua’s neck as he passed.

Joshua stopped short, surprised at the gift. “Thanks, buddy.”

Alec peeled away from Max. “Whatcha got there?”

Joshua held up the tin in his paws. “Green paint. Festive.”

“Why do you want festive paint?”

“Logan was telling Joshua about Christmas. Christmas is festive.”

Alec’s brow wrinkled. “What’s Christmas?”

“You come. Logan explain.” With more productive tasks easily pushed to one side, Alec followed after Joshua. If nothing else, he wanted to get an idea of how much paint would be involved.

*

For some bizarre and inexplicable reason, when Logan talked, people tended to listen. Even when it was topics of mind-numbing practicality, such as talking with Max and Mole about the supplies they were running low on, or repairs that needed to be made to a certain building, there were always some people on the fringes, keeping quiet, listening to him talk. Alec had always figured that it was because Logan was a normal, and was still a bit of a novelty. Alec insisted that he couldn’t understand why anyone would stay in Terminal City if they had somewhere else they could be.

Logan was adjusting the straps on his leg braces, one foot on the table in front of him and his pants rolled up to the knee. “It’s not really important,” he was saying, with a small wrench in one hand. “It really died out after the pulse. I mean, if you take a holiday that’s all about food and presents, and then destroy the economy-”

“What’s this?”

“What holiday?”

Alec rolled his eyes, and flopped back into a kitchen chair. “You’d better not need diagrams for this lecture,” he said. “Because we’re running low on paper.”

Logan looked like he had been caught in the headlights, but he slowly rolled the leg of his pants down, and straightened up, and started telling the people of Terminal City what he could remember.

“There was a child called Jesus, who was claimed to be the son of god, and he was born in Jerusalem, which is in the Middle East.”

“Sounds like my kind of town,” Mole called from the back of the small crowd, a puff of cigar smoke punctuating his short laugh.

Logan hadn’t been raised with any deep attention to religion, so his retelling of the life of Jesus was littered with words like 'apparently', and ‘I think’, and the five minute history lesson was rounded off with “And so people who believe in Jesus celebrate his birthday.”

Joshua grinned his doggy enthusiasm. “And where is the green?”

“Ah,” said Logan, and took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Well,” he began. ‘Apparently’ and ‘I think’ made numerous return appearances as Logan tried to explain pagan holidays, and how they were co-opted by the dominating religions in a given area, and then he had to explain that the holiday was originally to do with the winter solstice, and the days getting longer and – with a slightly ruffled look – how that was all tied in to fertility.

“What do long nights have to do with fertility?” an X7 asked as it held Gem’s baby, a sleeping, multicoloured bundle of blankets and scarves.

“What do you think they did to pass the time?” Alec called back, wiggling his eyebrows.

“So,” Logan said loudly, trying to get the lecture back on track, “Christmas was really a mix of things. A Christian event was celebrated using pagan and roman traditions, like bringing trees into the house and decorating them, and exchanging presents.”

“Given the roots in fertility, I’m guessing they were mainly industrial sized boxes of condo-” Alec was cut off as Max slapped him across the back of his head.

“You’d give people things that they wanted, or things that they needed. Or, if you didn’t know them very well, you’d give them something that was new and expensive. It could get competitive – two of my aunts tried to out-do one another in the expense of their presents every year. So sometimes the presents didn’t mean a lot. But sometimes they were great just because of who gave them to you.” There was a softness at the end of Logan’s voice, and Alec didn’t even have to guess that he was thinking about his parents. “By the end, Christmas wasn’t really about anything. It was just people being nice to one another for a few days, and trying to make one another happy.”

Joshua bounced, and clapped his paws together. “Christmas! We have Christmas!”

And Alec could feel the nodding all around, and tried not to feel exhausted at the prospect of painting fake pine branches onto the walls for the rest of the week.

*

Alec had to admit, as much as Christmas was a sham holiday designed to indulge greed and lust, it certainly stopped people complaining. Mutants who didn’t have the usual jobs of finding food and clothes all chipped in and cleared large spaces, building the stacks for bonfires in the streets and making decorations inside. Tinsel was non-existent, but Logan had visited Sketchy and brought back a stack of newspapers that were being made into paper chains. The more colourful pages had been requisitioned by Joshua, who was making a paper tree to suspend from the ceiling.

Logan had tried to teach a few people the handful of Christmas carols that he knew all the words too, a task that was both hindered and made infinitely more entertaining by the man’s discomfort at singing in front of a crowd. Not that it mattered – once the few musicians had their heads around the general tunes, they ran with them, making up their own lyrics and spiralling the music out and away from the original theme. New carols for a dead holiday. Alec had figured how to make bells using the casing of the larger calibre bullets, small stones, and scraps of string or wire. The effect was a dull tinkling, and a rather disturbed Logan.

“You’ve certainly got the place cheered up,” Max said during one of the few moments they had to exchange words.

“Holiday cheer is the best we can do,” Logan replied. “Food is low, we still don’t have enough blankets. We don’t even have medicine for the colds people are getting.”

“Meh,” Alec chipped in. “That stuff is all placebo anyway. Just tell them that Joshua’s paint fumes are infused with menthol.”

“At least the activity is keeping people warm,” Max replied. “We’re getting a lot less complaints about the cold.”

“We should start up some calisthenics classes once the holiday season is over.”

Logan rested his forehead against one hand. “We have new people arriving every week,” he said dully.”How are we going to manage?”

Max gave Alec a very pointed look, and Alec patted Logan on the back on her behalf. “But if you two get stuck under the mistletoe, you can find someone else to be your proxy.”

But as Alec looked out over the floor below them, and the bustle of off-key singing and soggy decorations, he felt a similar weight on his shoulders. He peeled away from Max and Logan, and headed out into the Seattle evening. The flag of the Freak Nation was starting to run, bowing down to the constant drizzle of rain.

*

Alec’s first call was Sketchy, partly due to the proximity of his flat to the Freak Nation, and partly because “Thanks to your pretty pictures, every man and his dog knows that I’m Manticore”.

“What do you want from me? I write pro-tans articles, I gave all my spare clothes to Cindy!”

Alec grinned. “Mainly, I need to you carry things. Come on.”

*

Normal was as happy as usual to see Alec. “How’s my boy?” he asked, pulling Alec into a warm, discomforting embrace. His fingered gripped the planes of Alec’s back. “I see the mutant uprising is keeping you in shape. Good shape.”

Alec ducked out of Normal’s grip, and retaliated with a few fake punches to his abdomen. “You know me, my body is a temple.”

“And I, for one,” Normal replied seriously, “would worship there any day.”

“Uhh... yeah. Anyway, I need a favour.”

*

Alec visited the strip clubs he’d frequented. He visited Crash. The visited OC and her new roommates, and then he beat a few people up in the markets and stole their money. It wasn’t the most low-profile thing to do, but Alec just couldn’t turn down the opportunity to beat a mofo with his own metal pole. And then, as afternoon ebbed into evening, Alec went back to collect Sketchy.

“So, why exactly do we need to sneak out of town, in the middle of winter, at night, when it’s cold, and cut down a tree?”

“Shut up, Sketchy.”

“Right. Well. Thanks for clearing that up.”

*

That night an unprecedented number of thefts occurred, targeting the warehouse district. Authorities suspected the mutant population, as usual, but left the cases alone given both the respective warmth within their stations, and the blame that could be laid upon the owners.

“Look,” Detective Sung said for the third time that evening, “if you’re not willing to make sure your own security system works, we can’t be held responsible when people take advantage of that. If it weren’t for neighbours calling to complain about all of the vans in the area, you wouldn’t have known that you’d been robbed for weeks.”

*

Given that she didn’t often sleep, Max didn’t wake up in the morning so much as snap out of a very deep, almost hypnotic daze. Someone had draped a bolt of thick flannel around her shoulders. Blinking slowly, and letting more than the basics of her surroundings come to her attention, she wrinkled her nose. She could smell smoke, and charred meat, and... pine? She bolted to the edge of the platform she had been sitting on.

There was a tree in the middle of the floor, looking a little worse from wear after it’s extraction from the ground, paper chains draped across it in either an unbalanced attempt at decoration, or one at hiding the broken branches. There were bundles wrapped in newspaper underneath it, Sketchy sitting cross-legged and working away at covering a small pile of woollen gloves.

“Hey Max,” he called cheerfully.

The bonfires outside had been lit, and animals hung over them, roasting slowly. The frozen meat roasting more slowly than the fresh, which would at least stagger the consumption. Some women that Max knew were strippers were snuggled up to the transgenics by the fire, attempting to learn the words to the Christmas songs. A guitar was being strummed, and people were laughing. Everyone had at least one jacket.

Max ran inside to find Logan.

*

“Look!” Joshua said excitedly, thrusting material at anyone who would stop to look. “We can have a real flag now! One that won’t melt!”

“He ran around, kicking everyone he knew out of bed,” Original Cindy said. “And when he ran out of dancers he came and found us.”

“Smile!” And then a flash went off, and Sketchy grinned at them from behind the camera.

“I can’t believe Alec would do this,” Logan said, looking around at the cheerful bustle that the main room of the command centre had become.

“I can,” Max said. “If there’s one thing Alec loves, it’s a party.”

Normal swept by carrying a jug of sweet-smelling milk. “Plus, he said that this would earn him a good month of putting his feet up, at least. Eggnog?”

“This is nice,” Max said, watching Asha pull a knitted hat with earflaps over a scaly head. “It’s nice having everyone together.”

Logan smiled at her. “That’s what Christmas is about.”

“Speaking of everyone,” Original Cindy interjected, one hand on her hip, “where is our Manti-Claus?”

After spreading out, Alec was found – fast asleep on that beaten and battered couch, one arm wrapped under a cushion so the corner was pressed into his face.

“Well now,” said OC, “isn’t that disgustingly cute?”

“You know,” Logan said thoughtfully, “I think there’s one Christmas tradition that I forgot to tell you all about.”

Joshua perked up. He loved all and every Christmas tradition.

“It’s a very specific one, for big gatherings.”

“Go on then,” Max said as OC nudged Logan with an elbow. “Spill.”

“When someone falls asleep at a Christmas party,” Logan said, “the party goers who find that person are under obligation to draw on the unconscious party’s face.” He looked up with all seriousness, “It’s good luck.”

Max fought back a smile. Joshua gave a small, excited jump. “Really?”

Logan shrugged one shoulder. “It can’t hurt.”

*

When Alec woke up, he looked more festive than both trees combined, and smelled perplexingly of menthol.


End file.
